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Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Tony Blair: Pantomime Villain

Alphen,
Netherlands. 18 June. Every Yuletide when I was a
kid my parents would haul me off to see a particularly perverse form of British
theatre called the Christmas Pantomime. Usual
stock included Jack and the Beanstalk,
Aladdin and Robin Hood, normally in cahoots with varying and often suspiciously
merry clown-like henchmen. Such ripping
yarns tended to have two things in common which can explain a lot about we
English. The lead ‘man; was invariably played by a woman whilst
the inevitable ugly woman had to be played incontrovertibly by a man. However, it was the pantomime villain who reigned
supreme (at least until the last scene).
A character so steeped in comic evil that his (on occasions her)
appearance would elicit a storm of high-pitched booing. Watching the visceral destruction of Tony
Blair this week by the British political class and Press as he tried to say
something sensible about Iraq I was reminded of those long gone innocent days
when anything seemed possible. Tony
Blair made some appalling mistakes but he is no pantomime villain.

Now, I must start with
a disclaimer. I was a big fan of Tony
Blair and from what I understand from one piece I wrote back in 1998 for the “New Statesman”, entitled “Time to Bite the Eurobullet” he was a
bit of a fan of me. Put simply, Blair was a leader who still
eclipses many of the current crop of politicians who clog the upper echelons of
British politics with pretend leadership.

Now, do not get me
wrong Blair made big mistakes. First, he
over-estimated and then under-estimated the impact of globalisation. His cynical use of hyper-immigration to ram
diversity down the throats of the right (in the infamous words of a Downing
Street memo of the time) and assuage the left of the Labour Party was
irresponsible in the extreme. Not only
did he render all immigration toxic in the minds of much of the British
population the self-serving left liberal London elite which he led refused to
see the damage such a large and rapid influx did to English urban society in
particular.

Blair then compounded
that error by imposing ‘multiculturalism’ rather than integration on the
British people. This led to patent
absurdities such as the tolerance of extremism at home which today sees so-called
‘British’ jihadists fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq whilst at one and the
same time sending British troops to Afghanistan to keep radical Islam at ‘strategic
distance’. Indeed, tens of thousands of
people from the poorest, most radical and traumatised parts of the world entered
Britain under Blair even as British troops were fighting Al Qaeda and the
Taliban. It was shaming that under Blair London became known
as Londonistan.

Second, Blair failed to
realise that Britain could never be at the ‘heart of Europe’ whilst being
outside the Eurozone (and even then probably not). The imposition on the British people of the
2007 Lisbon Treaty and the systematic misleading of the British people about
just how much sovereignty he was handing to Brussels without their permission
was unforgiveable. This was compounded
by Blair’s refusal to let the British people have a referendum on an issue of
fundamental constitutional importance.

Third, he should have
sacked Gordon Brown in 2001 when he won a second landslide electoral victory. The endless battles between Blair and Brown
added to a sense of a country being held to ransom by Labour Party politics
which emasculated effective government.
Moreover, the paralysis of government at the highest levels helped turn ‘light-touch’
banking regulation into an open invitation to criminal bankers to create the
2008 banking crisis which has damaged so many ordinary lives including my own.

And then there is
interventionism. Afghanistan and Iraq
are today deemed to be disasters because of American and British intervention. Certainly, tens if not hundreds of thousands of
people have died as a consequence of those events. However, it is utterly unfair to say that is
all the fault of Tony Blair or that both countries would have fared better if
no action had been taken. No-one knows
what would have happened if Saddam had stayed unchecked in Iraq or if the
Taliban/Al Qaeda had consolidated their hold on Afghanistan. Saddam clearly had ambitions to create
weapons of mass destruction even if he had not attained them by 2003 when the
coalition invaded. Saddam’s Baathist regime
was sustained by violence and war. Sooner
or later the Saddam regime would have either exploded or imploded under the
weight of its own violent inertia.

Al Qaeda in 2001
Afghanistan was trying to do the same as ISIS today in Iraq; create a base from
which to launch global Jihad. To suggest
that ISIS is an unintended consequence of the US-led invasion of Iraq is perverse. ISIS is a further mutation of violent Islamism
that is apparent across the globe from Nigeria to Afghanistan and beyond. Why are the French in Mali and the Central
African Republic?

Tony Blair also enjoyed
noted historic successes. It was Blair
who brought peace to the streets of Belfast and across Northern Ireland. It was Blair who used British forces to
successfully stop genocide in Sierra Leone.
It was Blair who rightly moved European defence forward in 1998 with the
St Malo agreement. It was Blair who
believed that Britain, Europe and the West had to engage in a dangerous world and
could be a “force for good”. It was Blair
who was the passionate advocate of Responsibility to Protect and a United Nations
that was more than a talking shop.
Indeed, it was precisely the belief that Saddam had ritually flouted UN-sanctioned
international law that led Blair to believe intervention was necessary.

Tony Blair failed not
because he was too cynical but because he was too much the
idealist. He failed at home because his attempts
to prepare Britain for the twenty-first century and the concept of ‘modernisation’
he championed were far more radical than the British people realised or were
prepared to accept. However, his
prescriptions were essentially correct. Sadly,
Blair’s abject failure has accelerated Britain's exaggerated decline. He has also left Britain a broken place, possibly about to break
up, bearing an unacceptable level of Brussels intrusion at an appalling
price and with little sense of itself or its place in the world.

Blair failed on the
international stage because he found himself trapped between an uncompromising
American president and a France and Germany which disagreed profoundly. He had to make a choice all British prime
ministers have since 1973 strenuously tried to avoid; the choice between America and Europe.

However, perhaps Blair’s
true failure was to open the door to Britain’s non-leaders of today. People who believe in nothing, believe
nothing is possible and worse do not believe in Britain or its future. Stalk the corridors of Westminster and
declinist cynicism oozes from every nook and cranny.

Tony Blair failed as a
prime minister. However, he is not the villain
he is so often painted. And, from time
to time he still has something to say that is worth listening to.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.